Preview of Vista On Old Hardware

Grooves writes "According to tests performed by Ars Technica, Windows Vista will need some coddling on old hardware. As a follow-up to their performance review of Vista Beta 2, Ars tested the latest public builds of Vista on hardware spanning from 2001 to a Thinkpad purchased a few months ago. The results show that Vista is extremely RAM hungry, graphical power is less of an issue unless you want eye candy, and hard drive I/O is critical. Also, their experience with 'in-place upgrades' was abysmal, and mirrored my own experiences."

Comments

Why should we really upgrade.

[suman28]

I am sure there will a few hundred posts pointing this out, but XP seems to do the job just fine for now. Just wait till Microsoft releases Vista SP2 or SP3, if that. What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Scarletdown]

What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

Sadly, that would be the sheeple who don't know any better, the ones who don't even know what DRM is all about, and don't realize that there are viable choices out there instead of just unquestioningly accepting whatever Redmond tosses their way through the big chain stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Anonymous Coward]

No there isn't

People use home computers for email, web browsing (covered by alternatives) and then all of those applications and games on the store shelves. Until most of those (or at least alot of them) are available for your alternative OS most people won't touch it with a 10 foot poll.

I just loaded up Ubuntu on a machine to see what its about.. I can't think of a single thing I will use it for other then the curiousity factor.

It doesn't run BF 2142 - it doesn't run Quicken or Quickbooks.
I do all of my development with VS.NET so its out there as well..

Until it gets application support that is all it will ever be on the client side.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Iron Condor]

I am sure there will a few hundred posts pointing this out, but XP seems to do the job just fine for now. Just wait till Microsoft releases Vista SP2 or SP3, if that. What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

Here's how it's going to happen: Our IT folks at work will hear that Vista is supposedly better at keeping viruses and trojans and such at bay than XP. Which doesn't really mean a lot, given XPs performance. So I'm very much inclined to believe MS when they say Vista is going to do better (i.e. less awfully). Given that this crap is what gives the IT folks one of their biggest headaches, they'll tell us to run Vista on the machines here at work. Then they'll insist that laptops connected to the (internal) network run Vista as well. Then the people who somehow manage to cling to XP will find that they cannot open the documents that were sent to them from Vista boxes any more because Office-007 (with the license to kill) is going to be just a smidge incompatible with Word-XP. Just enough to force everybody to upgrade their stuff and re-(re-re-re-re-)learn how to do some simple thing in Excel because the UI was changed just enough to obsolete all the keyboard shortcuts you finally learned.

At least that's kinda how we were forced from 98SE to XP.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[PastaLover]

I very much doubt Microsoft will provide application support for Linux any time soon. If you're a windows developer then it's pretty logical you'll be using windows for your development (unless you're lucky enough to work on something cross platform).

Linux has some interesting features (especially its software ecosystem) that Windows doesn't have, but I agree that it doesn't apply to everyone. For the average person doing web browsing and mail it'll work well enough though. There's replacements out there for quicken too. (though I have no idea how well they work)

My point being that you can't simply expect it to have the exact same software as windows available. For something with a 5% market share (number pulled out of my ass) you'll have to look at some alternative apps if you actually want the same functionality, quicken right now has no real incentive to get ported to Linux. Though it seems that, by its apparent popularity, a Linux port of it would be a real selling point for the OS.

The more things change...

[tkrotchko]

To summarize,

"The new version of windows requires more RAM than the last version, and despite MS promises to the contrary, never do an upgrade"

It would be news if this *wasn't* true for a new version of Windows.

Re:Your Mom would!

[rucs_hack]

pardon me, but I'm 40, a parent, and frankly I know more about operating systems then my son does, and he's supposedly adept at computers.

Mind you, I work with real operating systems, not the godawful rubbish microsoft sells. XP, and I'm sure vista after it, are forever relegated to running games and trivial things that he needs (and endless damn fixing). Anything serious happens on our linux or unix boxes, that he has little or nothing to do with.

What's going on here?

[MaWeiTao]

What I'd like to know is what in the hell is going on with the Aero theme that it is so absurdly demanding on the hardware.

I guess I don't understand the intricacies of what's going on because I see no reason whatsoever for a GUI to be more damanding than any contemporary PC game. The only excuse I see is sloppy and inefficient programming. It really leaves me with the impression that one of the big goals of Vista is to promote hardware sales.

Re:What's going on here?

[Shados]

Please note I do not know the details of the -implementation- of Aero, so the following is just the theory behind the concept:

The idea is, by making the UI hardware accelerated, you shift the burden of the UI from the cpu to the video card, which would be almost idle at that time, thus getting -better- performance overall (since GPUs are more efficient, and, again, was idle). Now, if you're hitting the GPU anyway, you have a lot of spare cycles, so might as well add eye candy, its "free" so to speak, since its just eating up idle time.

Then, the reason for a Direct X 9 requirement (thus forcing newer cards), is purely to be able to use the newer and more powerful APIs. As shown often in Macs vs Windows debates, keeping legacy around is often an issue. Now, if the decision of Microsoft to flush legacy in this scenario is right or wrong, is beyond the scope of my post.

Now, maybe Microsoft coded their UI in a way that went beyond just the idea of tapping into the idle GPU, and thats a stupid decision. The original idea though (as seen on both Macs and Linux), is a good one.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Scarletdown]

This story is no different than running the latest Linux distribution on old hardware.

That is not an entirely accurate comparison. The latest Linux distros will run fine on old hardware. Why is that? Because unlike the latest incarnation of Windows, you can pick and choose what packages you want that suit your needs and your hardware's capabilities.

Don't have the horsepower to run KDE or Gnome? Use IceWM, or Fluxbox, or some other lightweight WM. OpenOffice is too heavy duty for your system? Give AbiWord and Gnumeric a try, or even TED (if Rich Text Format is good enough for you). That's the beauty of Linux. Even the latest and greatest distro can be tailored to your needs and capabilities, and keeps otherwise perfectly good hardware out of the landfills.

Re:Does anyone..

[vought]

Does anyone have a side by side comparison with OS 10.4?

No, but I do have 10.4.8 running on a 1998-vintage PowerBook G3 Series machine with 256MB of RAM. We use it as a wired iTunes station for our studio and a web-browsing machine for in front of the TV.

Subjectively, it's not bad. I wouldn't try to accomplish any photo editing or other heavy-duty tasks, but for e-mail, web, and iTunes, it's snappy enough to be usable. With iTunes and Safari running, it's almost out of RAM, but runs without paging to death for about an hour of web surfing.

Based on this article, 1998 PC hardware is not going to provide the same level of service - if it'll even run Vista. Running Vista on a Virtual PC with 512MB of RAM is unusable, but I can't claim that as a valid comparison.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[laffer1]

I agree. With the release of IE7 and Windows Media Player 11 there is no new feature worth caring about. Its possible DirectX 10 could be an issue down the road with gaming but only if its adopted heavily by game developers. Regardless, as people buy new hardware the installs will increase. Even Windows ME is still run on some computers.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[laffer1]

The inverse problem is true in linux. Its hard to run new hardware on it, but support for ancient hardware is an install disk away. Many of the new motherboards have sata to pata bridges on them. There are only a few vendors who make them, but the linux community stopped at one since everyone can just buy systems with that part. This is not the way to gain market share. Eventually there will be enough pressure and hard work from a few dedicated programmers to make boards like the intel DP965LT work properly in linux.

This problem is also true with other operating systems. Microsoft only cares about new hardware now. They know people won't upgrade to vista in waves. Everyone on slashdot should be happy as we've all said windows is bloated! Removing legacy support makes debugging, security and other aspects easier for microsoft. Now if they would just clean up their api...

Just remember, customers asked for this.

Re:Security

[chrisvdp74656]

although the only antivirus offering compatible with Vista as of now if from TrendMicro.

Avast is fully compatible.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[jaweekes]

Sure but most people are not computer people, and companies also have to worry about internal hackers , and people who will run unknown exe's from a link that was in an email sent by Uncle Stuart...

As we are all computer people, yes I think you are fine.

I'm going to install Vista on a new laptop at work, but only because it will give me a better computer ;-) (gotta love the required specs!), and I need to know about it for my job.